So German

After two days of speaking German with relatives of various degrees of closeness, my mouth is starting to adapt and my brain is getting better at retrieving long lost words. I’m no longer mortified when I have to ask for help, but it still makes me feel awkward. Like I’m suddenly clumsy in a place that’s my strength. I’m never at a loss for words in my American life.

And then there’s the problem of what to say.  This morning, at breakfast, I found myself sitting across from two men in their sixties that are only vaguely related.  They were my cousin’s cousins on the side not related to me.  I knew them because they - like us - had escaped to West Germany and drifted out there, with no family to anchor them.  Whenever they drove past our town on their way to somewhere else ( I particularly remember a time they were setting off to camp in Holland in their VW camper) they stopped for coffee.  When I was 10, the younger one, Frieder,  was 16.  I adored him, because he was silly and willing to swing me around.  Apparently that’s still a basis for a relationship, because here we sit, the bleary morning after the festivities, stumbling through a conversation that seeks to bridge 50 years.  You can’t summarize, so you just try to pick up.  It turns out we both believe in organic food. 

The older one, Heiner, talks about a friend who wanted to enter a photography contest titled “ Typisch Deutsch”.  Typical German. His friend struggled to think of something positive that could be labeled that way.  Perhaps, Heiner, says, when you move away, you see the positive?  I counter with a story from the eighties during my days at the multinational corporation.  A consultant spent hours teaching us why the Japanese were  outperforming American companies.  My husband asked him why he only talked about the Japanese. Why not use the other successful economy, the German one, as a model.  The answer:  “The German model is based on competence. That would never work here.”   Heiner and Frieder look at each other and nod.  Then smile at me. True, they would never think of that.  

Are the Germans self-critical by nature? Or is their self-criticism the lingering consequence of two World Wars?